I am sharing my journey to True Analytics Platform, how we work here, and what our daily life looks like. Although I am a Service engineer, this is also related to other tech roles within our organization, too.

My Path to True Analytics Platform

I graduated from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang with a Software engineering bachelor’s degree in 2019. At that time, I was trying to find a job before I graduated and I got a chance to interview with True Analytics Platform team from my senior who I worked with when I was an intern at Agoda.

One week after sending my CV to the team, True Analytics platform answered me back and sent me an invitation for an interview round in True Digital Group Office at True Digital Park, the office looks innovative and beautiful!

I went through three interviewers from different teams within True Analytics Platform. We discussed the projects that I did in school and also solved some programming problems. At the end of the interview, they talked about what kind of work they do in each team and the vision of what the team would be in the future.

I think it was a good approach for a new grad candidate to decide on their career path. Some people might not know what kind of work they are going to deal with until they join the team.

A week after the interview, I finally got an offer that landed me the position of Service Engineer in True Analytics Platform team.

Service Engineer team

I formally joined True Analytics Platform in July 2019. As a new graduate who has done a few algorithmic problems and small projects for college events, I didn’t really know how transitioning to a real-life developer role would look and feel like. Most of the teams were very small at that time (in fact, I was Service Engineer #2!). And a lot of them were very young but highly talented in their own fields which made me very optimistic for how they treat and train younger people like myself.

Even though we are a small team, my lead engineer is highly skilled. I work closely with him and gain a lot of knowledge and skill. From my perspective, it is an advantage of a small team and I enjoy it.

As Service Engineers, we are mainly responsible for building APIs and web services. These backend services power our products’ frontend components; for some, the API is the actual product; or in most cases, internal APIs glue together different systems and applications. The challenge is in ensuring that the APIs we build are stable and fast despite the big data volumes that we have to handle. Our team constantly has to research new technologies, apply advanced techniques, design and develop new software programs that meet the requirements of our internal and external customers.

Team rotations

True Analytics Platform team also allows for team rotations. If you like, you can ask to rotate into other teams, which helps keep things fresh.

In True Analytics Platform team, we have software and data engineering, architecture, application development, QA, infrastructure, and DevOps team for you to keep yourself excited and enable you to learn and acquire new knowledge and skill here.

Work from home: COVID-19

At first, it was hard for me to work from home in this situation since our work needs to collaborate and communicate together with both the business team and among our team. At the office, we could walk and reach out to each other easily but during work from home, I found out that it was a little bit hard to reach out to the team since this pandemic was new to us.

After that, we become more familiar with this new normal life that we don’t know how it is going to end. We become more active on Slack which makes our progress flowing. Also, I found out that work from home gives me more flexibility to make independent decisions and work with my own rhythm. It makes me focus better on my work and that will be indispensable if I am not mentioning about no more long commutes and no traffic jams!

Big thanks to our heads of the team, who consider our health and safety should come first. They allow us to work from home promptly after this pandemic occurs. Hope to see everyone at the office again!

Life at True Analytics Platform

Since our team is young and works closely together, the atmosphere at the office is very cheerful and playful but still productive. So there is no need to worry about stress while working, we have a happy workplace here.

On every floor, there is a pantry for everyone to get coffee or tea, grab some snacks, or have lunch. By the way, our head of the team also bought some snacks for us to enjoy almost every month (When we used to work at the office).

Also if you are feeling tired, there is a massage program that allows you to refresh yourself for like 10 minutes (The massage parlor is located at the same building in our office!).

We also work closely with our Head of Analytics platform and Head of Engineering, at first I was scared to ask them a question because my question might be sounding dumb but in fact, they love questions and they make sure that all our questions are answered! So after that, I ask a lot of questions and it improves me.

On technical skills, we use Scala as a main language for developing things here. I have started to learn Scala here and since I started getting to know Scala, I’m starting to love it as it provides both core principles of object oriented and functional programming. Scala recognizes the compromise and trusts the developers will know when to use one or the other. Not only Scala that I have learned from here, you will be hands-on

If you are a Service Engineer, your main tools will be Scala, Docker, Kubernetes and JMeter(For performance testing). For databases we are using Redis, PostGresSQL, BigQuery and RocksDB.

Apart from technical skills that I have learned from here. Our Head of Engineering also encourages us to learn non-technical skills. For me, I have learned the mental models. There are many mental models that you can adapt with your work and your daily life. Mental models help you improve the quality of your thinking. They simplify the complexity into understandable and organizable chunks.

The next step in my career, I would see myself as a senior software engineer who keeps the team’s performance to be high and sustainable. So, I will continue learning and developing my skills.

My university batchmates and I (3rd from right) who started our careers at True Analytics. This photo was taken during a team outing.